


Stargazing

by Fairfaxleasee



Category: Andromeda Six (Visual Novel)
Genre: Autism Spectrum, Dissociation, Eventual Romance, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:29:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26818852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fairfaxleasee/pseuds/Fairfaxleasee
Summary: Calderon struggles with his feelings for Traveler while checking how she's doing settling in to her navigator role.
Relationships: Calderon Lynch/Traveler
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Stargazing

“Stowaway!”

Calderon braced himself for whatever ‘perfectly reasonable’ explanation Cassandra was about to tell him for why he had found her in the navigator’s chair, feet dangling over the headrest auburn mane cascading towards the floor literally staring out into space when she was  _ supposed _ to be learning the ship’s navigational system.

“You know there are judges who would consider that slanderous. I am not, strictly speaking, a stowaway. Being a stowaway requires both boarding a vessel and doing so clandestinely. Seeing as how I was unconscious at the time, I cannot be said to have boarded, rather I was on-boarded, and you have, on several occasions, admitted to having been aware of the action.”

Calderon sighed.

_ Forget princess, this woman should be a lawyer… _

“Ergo…”

Cassandra spun the chair around to face him, flipping herself upright as she did so to laze easily to one side hip jutting out allowing him to take in the sumptuous curve of her lower body before being drawn in by the trickster’s grin spread unapologetically across her face.

“When the situation is examined in the entirety of its context, Captain, the inescapable conclusion is less that I am a stowaway, and more that you are a kidnapper.”

Calderon considered engaging her in the pointless battle of wits she was clearly challenging him to. The exercises in low-stakes mental brinkmanship were one of the few things she clearly enjoyed, at least when she was dealing with someone she considered a worthy opponent. The pointless but harmless mischief that danced behind her eyes was a welcome change from the gaping void he had seen there in the wake of her recovering her memories.

_ No, the void had been there before. And she still has memories that aren’t there. _

Most of what should have been her memories weren’t there. After she told everyone who she was, although Calderon had suspected it since hearing her name, various members of the crew had tried to talk with her about her life in the palace. Sebastian and Aya to try to engage with her, Ryona to coax out some of her medical history, himself to pump her for information that could be useful going forward. She could recall and recount in astonishing detail almost every book she had ever read, every movie or episodic series she had ever seen, every vidgame she had ever played, and just about every fact, concept or idea she had ever encountered, numbers and syllables would sometimes be rearranged in her head, 2876 would become 2786, his own name had somehow become “Caladrian,” but overall Calderon had gotten less reliable accounts from security footage. She could recount things she had observed in the palace with the same precision and detail, but ask her about an event she played any sort of an active role in and she would usually try to answer, giving vague, broad descriptions but after any length of time or when pressed too hard for details she would describe it as ‘burning and glaring and tight and hurting’ before withdrawing from the exchange entirely. ‘Dissociative amnesia,’ Ryona called it. A mental defense mechanism to erase events that were too painful or damaging to live with. As opposed to the full retrograde amnesia she suffered when she had awoken on the ship. 

“But it’s practically her entire life!” he had protested.

“I know. It worries me too.” was the only response Ryona had been able to conjure.

The grin was sliding from Cassandra’s face now, her eyes shifting to gaze unfocused at an empty corner, tears starting to form around the edges.

_ Damn! _

He had to act quickly. She had wanted to play a game with him and in his reminiscing he had ignored the invitation. She  _ was _ supposed to be learning the navigation system, and while he would admonish her for that at some point in the discussion, if he could catch her quickly enough for her to even be able to continue the discussion, he knew she had taken his reaction, or more precisely lack thereof, for something much more hostile, or worse, uncaring. He grabbed the arm of the chair before she could turn it back to face the stars.

“I like the stars,” he remembered her saying on a previous occasion he caught her staring transfixed out a porthole. “They keep to themselves, you always know where they are and where you stand with them, and nothing anyone does ever hurts them. Also they’re very shiny.” He didn’t need his Guard training to know that addendum was just an attempt to deflect attention from the real source of her admiration.

“We can continue our debate about how you came on this ship later, Cassan...Cass.”

He hoped he had been successful at keeping any trace of anger out of his tone. Men sounding angry always distressed her, again, it didn’t take a Guard to guess why. He’d seen it push her over the edge before and he needed her to come back, and not just because Ryona might actually kill him if he did any permanent damage, because the only thing he hated more than seeing her languish in the painful void of the memories she couldn’t actually remember was watching her fall into it.

Her eyes flicked across the room at nothing in particular. Good, she wasn’t gone yet. Her eyes were always still when there was nothing left behind them. As long as they were moving, she was thinking. He could almost see the precision clockwork gears running in her mind. Weighing the entire history of their interaction to play out possible reactions before finally settling on a plan of action.

“The way I see it, Captain…”

Her voice was hesitant and she wouldn’t look at him, neither of which boded well, but she rarely called him ‘Captain’ without following it with some stinging barb or another. She glanced furtively in his direction and he let an arrogant smirk glide across his face, an invitation for her to try to land the blow she had planned.

“There wouldn’t be a need to continue the debate if you weren’t so damnably insistent on being so fucking wrong all the time.”

_ Life in the Guard and on a starship and a damn princess has a mouth that puts them both to shame. _

And there were things he wanted to do to that mouth. And that he wanted it to do to him.

“Whatever you say. But care to explain how sitting upside down staring into space is going to help you learn the navigation system?”

“Well, as to the staring into space part, navigation, very generally speaking, involves using information from one’s surroundings to discern both where one is and where one is going. Seeing as how we are in space, there is quite literally nothing around us except for the stars, so we are rather stuck using them, but I was considering just how objectively rational that was given the general consensus of an expanding universe and the occasional black hole dictates

that they are hardly the universal constants they are generally taken for.”

“And the upside down part?”

“Well, I can’t help you with that, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Calderon considered this. While he was fairly certain she was just trying to lead him into asking a question she could give a trick answer to, given the problems with her memory, he wasn’t prepared to take it for granted. If she actually didn’t remember what had happened he may have to reassess the situation. But he also didn’t want to upset her again. He hadn’t wanted to upset her the first time, so he chose his tone and words carefully.

“So are you saying that you weren’t sitting with your feet up over the headrest of the chair before we started talking.”

“Oh, nothing of the sort. That is indeed where I recall having placed them, although the exact position of my own feet at any given time isn’t of much interest to me. But what does that have to do with being upside down?”

“Maybe you’re unaware of this, but having your feet up and your head down is what being upside down entails.”

“But is it though? I mean, when you think about it, outside the gravitational pull of a celestial object, there fundamentally is no one way to orient oneself in space. And even  _ with _ the pull of a celestial object, it’s less a matter of ‘up’ or ‘down’ and more ‘towards’ and ‘away,’ so given that isn’t ‘upside down’ really just another mass delusion that feeds itself on the willful ignorance of its victims?”

Calderon just raised an eyebrow at this. From just about anyone else he would have chalked the speech up to just another entitled jerk with a more expensive education than most trying to throw their intellectual weight around to cover for how little there was, but when she was in the mood to, Cassandra just liked playing with concepts and arguments like a cat with an insect. Or Damon with people. He had known that there was a thin line between genius and madness, he just wished someone would have warned him about its captivating eyes, wicked sense of humor, and other...assets.

“Okay, fine, you got me. This stupid book fucking sucked so I thought I’d try and look at it from a different perspective.”

She got up to retrieve her holopad from where she had likely pushed it across the floor, its display open to the instruction manual for the navigation system.

_ So she got bored and decided to start staring into space. She was supposed to be learning to use the system but got bored and started staring into space instead. She was thinking about representing bodies traveling through a three-dimensional space so she was probably reading about the UI when she got bored, and the UI...is the first topic. She got bored on the first topic and started staring into space. _

“Ugh, look, it’s not my fault, all right? The prose was rigid and pedestrian and the writing was formulaic and predictable. I skipped to the end and I was right that the UI had done it, I bet he was working with that zebra from the dictionary.”

“It’s an instruction manual. It’s not supposed to be entertaining.”

“But it wasn’t being instructional. Look, this is not that hard. The computer does about 95% of the work once you punch in your starting and ending coordinates, the only time anyone actually has to monitor this is when we’re in gravitational orbit or on an approach vector, or we wander into an asteroid field or something, and all that monitoring involves is watching the GUI which has the ship held at a gyroscopic center as the display moves around it oriented on the command window with external objects represented by color-coded icons based on mass and speed. I don’t even have to know how to take the relative coordinates because they come up when I touch the icons. Not that hard.”

_ Six weeks. I sat through a six week course on this navigational system when I joined the guards, actual navigators have to go through a three year program, and she learned it in… _

“Cass…”

“What?”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long did it take you to figure that out?”

“Like this thing specifically?”

“Yes”

“From reading the once again incredibly stupid book and playing with the button thing?”

“The navigational panel, yes.”

“I mean, counting the time I spent trying to make the book be more entertaining, maybe like 45 minutes.”

“45 minutes? You learned navigation in 45 minutes?”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Then what would you say?”

“Well, I don’t know if you know this, but I play a lot of vidgames…”

Caldron recalled, with more detail than he’d have liked, the argument she had gotten into with Sebastian about whether his poker games counted as ‘vidgames.’

“I had a suspicion.”

“Most vidgames, and I mean like  _ actual _ vidgames, have a map. So I would say I learned navigation from vidgames. It’s a very fungible concept.”

“Fine, and how long did it take you to learn navigation from vidgames?”

“Like grand total learn how to do it all vidgames?”

“Yes.”   
  
“Umm...maybe, like 3 days?”   
  


“Cass.”

“What? I can work the button thing and not crash the ship, why does it matter how I learned to do it?”

_ Well, ‘navigation panel’ is clearly going to be ‘button thing’ from now on… _

“Please just read the manual.”

Cassandra let out a melodramatic sigh and threw herself back into the chair. These exaggerated histrionics were her way of surrendering on principle while signaling her intent to exact concessions.

_ She wants to try and negotiate over this? Fine, she’s not the only one who can try and wrangle concessions. _

Calderon followed her to the chair gripped the arms and leaned over her while she sat grinning up at him with such a wicked expression that it took every ounce of self-control he had not to crush his mouth into hers and take everything she was willing to give him.

_ She hates being touched. _

He remembered the look of pain and discomfort that always flashed across her face at any physical contact, he refused to remember what happened when Aya had tried to comfort her by hugging her.

He swallowed, closed his eyes, and smiled.

“Just read the stupid fucking book.”

“That’s all you want me to do? Just read the stupid fucking book?”

_ Here we go with the concessions. _

“Yes, that’s all I want you to do. I want you to read every word in the book, before you get out of this chair…”

_ That should head off her ‘eventually’ argument...she wouldn’t somehow unscrew the chair and carry it around with her, right? _

“Hmph, that’s it?”

He knew he should quit now, that everything he said to her would just be twisted beyond recognition when she started ‘doing exactly what he told her to do,’ but he didn’t care. He was getting to like these pointless battles of wits, and she was definitely a worthy opponent.

“No, that’s not it. Every time you call the navigation panel the ‘button thing’ or ‘button thingy’ or ‘buttony thingy’ or anything…”

“Substantially similar?”

“Yes, that. Every time you do that, you have to read the manual again.”

“And how are you going to  _ know _ I’ve read the manual again?”

“Because I’m going to sit there and listen to you read every single word of it.”

“So the deal is, I read every single word of the manual, here, before I get out of this chair, and after the deal is struck every time I call the button thing the button thing or something substantially similar, I have to read it, referring to the manual, again while you listen to me do it?”

“Yes, that’s the deal?”

“Hmmmm...I don’t know if I like that deal…”

“I could quiz you on the manual after you read it every time.”

“Ugh, no, that’s even worse. Fine the deal is made. I’ll start right now, you can get a preview of what it sounds like: a, an, of, and, or, not, the, this…”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Exactly what I said I would, reading every word in the manual. It’s not my fault you failed to specify any particular ordinal restrictions. Also my way is more efficient, because most of the words I’ve read so far appear a LOT so my way is much better if you think about it. Of course, if you WANT to put ordinal restrictions in place, we could always re-negotiate, but that would require you risking me not agreeing to the nomenclature clause again.”

“You keep this up and I may just have to demote you to ‘lawyer.’”

“Well, far be it from me to tell you how to run your ship, Captain. But I have an incredibly fucking stupid book to be getting on with.”

Without thinking, he reached his hand out to touch her cheek, stopping when he saw her reflexively flinch away from the movement and imminent contact it foretold.

“I’m sorry.”

Calderon was surprised to hear her voice echo his own.

“Don’t be, it was my fault. I know how you feel about being touched, I just...forgot myself.”

“No, it’s not...that’s not...what I meant...should’ve said...it’s…I can’t, no don’t...”

He could see her working the gears in her mind into a frenzied pace in an attempt to explain herself so he would understand. He had tried to tell her she didn’t need to, but something still compelled her to try.

_ Another thing she just won’t listen to me about. _

“Cass, it was my fault.”

“But it shouldn’t be!”

“But it was. We can leave it there.”

“No! I...I should be able to do this, I can learn to use the stupid navigator computer in 10 minutes…”

“Didn’t you say it took you 45 minutes?”

“No, I said it took 45 minutes including trying to make the book be entertaining. I should be able to explain...thing without...tight!”

“I can listen when you’re ready to tell me.”

“But I should be ready now!”

“But are you?”

“I’m supposed to be ready now…”

“But you aren’t?”

“...no. Can’t.”

“Should I stay?”

She shook her head at him and picked up the holopad, going back to picking out individual words from the manual to read in no logical order, beyond that it not be the order they had been printed in. Calderon watched her for a few seconds before leaving her on the bridge. Cassandra was clearly an old hand at picking herself up and dusting herself off, he just hoped that she had asked him to leave because she wanted to be alone and not because she just thought she had taken up enough of his time.

_ If she’s still committed to following through reading the entire manual out of order she’ll be fine...this time. _

“Do you think it was a good idea to leave her alone?”

Calderon sighed. He couldn’t say that his medic’s concerns weren’t valid or that her heart wasn’t in the right place, but he couldn’t help thinking she was starting to overstep her role.

“Not really. But I think staying would have been a worse one.”

“Someone should be with her.”

“Ryona, she doesn’t want anyone with her.”

“You’re right, she doesn’t want anyone with her, she wants you with her. She hasn’t engaged with anyone else the way she engages with you, she won’t even talk to me any more...”

“Because she thinks you’re spying on her. Because you ARE spying on her.”

“She’ll be polite with Aya and Bash but only up to a point, and she won’t go out of her way to interact with them. I’m not quite sure if she’s avoiding June or he’s avoiding her, she barely acknowledges Damon exists...”

“Are you seriously suggesting that it would be good for her mental state to spend time around the person who suggested selling her to the man who killed her family?”

“That’s not what I’m suggesting and you know it. She needs someone right now and she likes you.”

“That’s the problem, Ryona.”

“Why is that a problem? You seemed to be enjoying yourself earlier…”

“Did you miss the part where I screwed up and tried to touch her?”

“I...no, but you like her.”   
  


“I like her as someone I want to sleep with, and that’s not what she wants. Or needs.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Why don’t you check your notes and tell me?”

Ryona just glared at him.

“Ryona, I can’t ask her to do that.”

“Because you’re afraid she’ll say no?”

“Because I’m afraid she’ll say yes! I can’t, I  _ won’t _ pressure her into doing something like that, and I don’t see a way to ask her without that happening.”

Ryona sighed, deflating slightly.

“I know, but...I just think you should let it be her choice. And she can’t make it if you don’t ask.”

“Didn’t this conversation start by you telling me to go back to the bridge after she wanted me to leave?”

Ryona smiled slightly.

“That was my opinion as her doctor. This is my opinion as someone who wants you both to be happy.”

“I’ll...consider it. And thank you.”


End file.
